The word ‘content’ as it figures in the title of this seminar
is a piece of philosophical jargon; it applies first and foremost to
what is called propositional content, which is whatever is
ascribed to mental states and speech acts via that-clauses, as
in

Jean-Paul believes that existence precedes essence

Martin hopes that there is life after death

In uttering ‘Il pleut’, Odile was telling you that it was
raining

"Content" may also be ascribed without a that-clause, as
in

He asked me to feed his rodents while he’s in Miami

Betty wants to go to Lespinasse

It’s usually assumed, rightly or wrongly, that even in these
latter cases the content ascribed is propositional, or, more
cautiously, that, even if it’s not directly propositional, then
we’ll at least be a short step from understanding what’s going
on in non-that-clause ascriptions of content once we know what’s
going in that-clause ascriptions.

The word ‘explanation’ in our title alludes in the first
instance to commonsense propositional-attitude explanations.
Such explanations are often explanations of propositional-attitude
facts, as in

I concluded that you must really loathe New York because I heard
you tell Hilda you’d prefer to live in New Jersey

Lester filed for divorce because he hated sleeping on crumbs and
couldn’t get his wife to stop eating crackers in bed

There are also propositional-attitude explanations of
non-intentional facts, as in

Why is Henrietta stretched out on the floor like that? Because she
wants to find her collection of Frank Sinatra’s cigarette butts and
thinks it’s probably under the bed

Henry’s face suddenly became red because he just then realized
that Jerry Fodor overheard him say that Britney Spears was a better
singer than any soprano the MET could produce; the redness of his face
was a blush

Propositional-attitude explanations of non-intentional facts will
have a special importance for us.

We wouldn’t be giving a seminar on content’s role in
explanation if that topic didn’t signify an area of philosophical
controversy. The primary source of the controversy can be put
succinctly. On the one hand, propositional-attitude properties seem to
play a certain causal-explanatory role; but, on the other hand, they
seem to many, for one reason or another, to be unable to play the
causal-explanatory role they seem to play. Let’s start by looking
at some objections to the claim that propositional-attitude properties
enter essentially into correct causal explanations of non-intentional
facts.[1]
After that I’ll take a brief critical look at some of the more
salient positions to which a theorist might retreat if she’s
skeptical of content’s playing a serious causal-explanatory role,
and then I’ll conclude with some all-too-brief remarks about my own
take on the questions at issue.

Before getting down to business, I should qualify the
advertisement implicit in calling this squib an introduction to this
year’s Mind & Language seminar. The qualification is that we
shouldn’t expect every "thinker of the week" to speak
directly to the issues now to be surveyed. As always, a considerable
amount of leeway is permitted in how broadly or narrowly a given
philosopher chooses to place on the announced topic so that she may
subsume under it whatever she most wants to discuss with us.

I. Skepticism About Content’s
Causal-Explanatory Role

Ava is sitting at a table at Le Cirque when of a sudden her right
hand rises, arm attached, to a position just above her right ear.
What explains the fact that Ava’s hand rose to that position? We
appear to have at least two correct explanations. One is a
commonsense propositional-attitude explanation: Ava wanted the check;
she believed that the best way to get it was to signal the waiter in a
way that would be instantly recognized as a request for the check and
that raising her hand in the way question .... The other explanation
is wholly non-intentional and speaks of electrochemical activity in
Ava’s nervous system and the consequent stimulation of effector and
receptor cells in her body and of their effects on her bodily
movements. No one knows this explanation, but we know it exists.
Both explanations appear to be causal explanations; that is, they
appear to be telling us what caused the explanandum. If that
appearance is correct and the ascribed propositional-attitude
properties enter essentially into the proffered explanation that
mentions them, then, as any theorist in this area would agree, the
intentional explanation must be importantly related to, and somehow
dependent on, the more basic non-intentional explanation. It’s at
this point, however, that agreement tends to peter out. As already
remarked, some philosophers think that what’s required isn’t
satisfied and that, therefore, propositional-attitude properties
don’t enter essentially into correct causal explanations of
non-intentional facts. Philosophers who hold this skeptical view
usually have two parts to their story: an objection to the claim that
propositional-attitude properties play a causal-explanatory role and
an account of them and their use in ‘because’ statements
that’s designed to remove the patina of counter-intuitiveness from
the skeptical claim. What follows next is a critical look at some of
the alleged objections that have helped to move the skeptics to
their skepticism about content’s causal-explanatory role (another
way of referring to the causal-explanatory role of
propositional-attitude properties).

The reasons-aren’t-causes objection. In the fifties,
beginning shortly after Wittgenstein’s death, there were several
books and articles by American and British philosophers many of whom
considered themselves to be developing lines of thought that were
either implicit in the later Wittgenstein or at least ones to which
one would naturally be led when philosophizing in the style of his
Philosophical Investigations.[2] Some of these philosophers—e.g.,
Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, H. L. A. Hart, William Dray, Elizabeth
Anscombe, Anthony Kenny, A. I. Melden, R. S. Peters, and P. Winch[3]—held
positions which committed them to the following two claims, whose
conjunction entails that propositional-attitude explanations aren’t
causal explanations, and that therefore content doesn’t play a
causal-explanatory role:

Propositional-attitude explanations are causal explanations only
if the propositional-attitudes mentioned in them are not merely the
reasons for which the agent did what she did, but also the
causes of her doing what she did.

But reasons can’t be causes because (i) as Hume taught us,
causes must be contingently connected to their effects, whereas (ii)
the reasons for which an agent performed an action are conceptually
connected to the action in a way that precludes a contingent
connection.

Now (1) is plausible. Just as the explanation one gives in
saying

The match lit because it was scratched

wouldn’t count as a correct causal explanation unless the
match’s lighting was caused by its having been scratched, so the
explanation one gives in saying

Ava moved her hand in a certain way because she wanted to get the
check and believed that the best way to get it was to move her hand in
that way

wouldn’t count as a correct causal explanation unless Ava’s
belief and desire caused her hand movement. The Humean claim made in
(2)(i) in its most plausible formulation is that the causation
relation is one that holds contingently: the fact that c caused
e is never a logical or conceptual or metaphysical necessity;
there’s always a sense in which c might have occurred
without causing e. This most plausible formulation is likely to
seem pretty plausible, so the crux of the neo-Wittgensteinian line is
its claim that the relation expressed by ‘x was the reason
for which y did z’ is "conceptual" in a way
that precludes reasons from being causes. This is where the
neo-Wittgensteinian line falls apart. Two claims were made about the
"conceptual connection." First, they said that the reason
contains a "reference" to the action, in the way that
Henrietta’s wanting to get drunk contains a reference to her
getting drunk. Second, they said that when one tries to complete a
propositional-attitude explanation sketch, one gets something that
looks pretty close to being analytic, such as what you get when you
move from

She went into the kitchen because she wanted a beer

to what they would call its completion, something like

If a person desires result R, believes that the best way to
get R is to do Y, has no stronger competing desires,
knows how to do Y, is not physically or psychologically
prevented from doing Y, and doesn’t change her mind, then,
ceteris paribus, she will do Y. Mary desired to drink a
beer, believed that the best way to accomplish that was to go into the
kitchen and get one from the fridge, knew how to get into the kitchen,
was in no way prevented from doing that, didn’t change her mind,
and cetera were paria. So, Mary went into the
kitchen.

One problem with this second conceptual-connection argument is that
even if there were connections of the kind suggested, it would do
nothing to show it’s not the case that when you did something for a
certain reason, you might have had that reason without doing what you
did. As Donald Davidson emphasized in "Actions, Reasons, and
Causes," if the cause and effect are described under descriptions
that make it analytic that a thing falling under the cause description
would be followed by a thing falling under the effect description,
this wouldn’t show that it wasn’t a contingent fact that the
cause caused the effect. For example, rain clouds would contingently
cause rain even if it were analytic that rain clouds cause rain, for
it would still be the case that those things that were in fact rain
clouds might not have been; it’s merely a contingent truth about
those clouds that they have the property of being rain clouds. A
second problem with the just stated conceptual-connection argument is
that the "ceteris paribus" generalization isn’t
analytic unless the "ceteris paribus" qualification
simply comes to "unless she doesn’t do Y," which
would render it useless as a premise in an explanation of Mary’s
going into the kitchen. A third problem is that no such analytic
generalization either occurs, or needs to occur, in anything that
could properly be called a complete commonsense propositional-attitude
explanation. As for the first of two alleged cause-precluding
conceptual connections, it’s simply false that reasons refer to the
particular actions they appear to be causing: if I want to win the
sweepstakes but don’t win it, no one will accuse ‘Schiffer wants
to win the sweepstakes’ as suffering from reference failure. The
important point, however, is that while it’s true that, say,
‘Henrietta wants to get drunk’ involves the concept of getting
drunk, that gives no reason whatever to think that Henrietta might
have had that desire and not gotten drunk.

The strong-reduction objection. Let’s stipulate that
the property of being F strongly reduces to the property of
being G only if the property of being F = the property
of being G. Then the present objection to the commonsense view
of propositional-attitude explanation may be stated as the following
two-part claim:

A propositional-attitude property plays an essential role in a
correct causal explanation of a non-intentional fact only if it
strongly reduces to a non-intentional property that figures
essentially in a correct non-intentional causal explanation of the
same fact.

No propositional-attitude property strongly reduces to any
non-intentional property.

The usual argument for (2) is one that is also taken to apply to
mental properties that aren’t propositional-attitude properties;
this is that such properties are multi-realizable, may, that
is, be "realized" by various non-intentional properties
without being identical to the disjunction of them. This invites the
counter response of David Lewis, Jaegwon Kim and others that what
really enters into correct propositional-attitude explanations
isn’t, say, the property of believing that such-and-such but rather
a contextually relevant species-specific property such as, so to say,
the property of human-believing that such-and-such, which property,
they further claim, is arguably not subject to multiple realization
and can be identified with a causal-explanatory non-intentional
property and, ultimately, with a property statable in the language of
fundamental physics. "In this way," Kim argues,
"multiply realized properties are sundered into their diverse
realizers in different species and structures, and in different
possible worlds."[4]

In fact, however, there is a much more compelling case for (2) than
any based on multiple realization. For even if multiple realization is
the best reason for supposing that non-intentional properties like
pain can’t be identified with any non-mental property, there is a
much better reason that applies only to propositional-attitude
properties. The point is very simple: no property in an underlying
non-intentional explanation will have what it takes even to be a
candidate for strongly reducing a propositional-attitude property.
For consider the property of believing that there are no unicorns.
The most plausible account of this property sees it as a
composite property composed of the belief relation and
the proposition that there are no unicorns, where
‘proposition’ for now is simply a label for whatever things are
the references of that-clauses. Given this, any non-intentional
property that could strongly reduce the composite belief property
would itself have to be a composite property one part of which was
identical to the belief relation, the other part identical to the
proposition that there are no unicorns.[5] But just try finding the non-intentional
relation to the proposition that 12 + 12 = 4 in
the physical explanation that subserves the fact that little Johnny
wrote ‘4’ because he was trying to answer the question
"What’s the sum of 12 + 12?" and he
believed that 12 + 12 = 4. If correct
propositional-explanations of non-intentional facts are causal
explanations that essentially involve propositional-attitude
properties, then the non-intentional explanations that underly the
propositional-attitude explanations won’t be statable using
composite non-intentional predicates that express relations to
propositions. We can dismiss out of hand the idea that
propositional-attitude properties strongly reduce to properties
involved in non-intentional explanations. It further follows that
propositional-attitude properties don’t reduce to functional
relations that require physical realizations; for such realizations
would have to be physical relations to propositions. This leaves open
whether propositional-attitude relations can be identified with
topic-neutral relations such as the ones implied by Jerry Fodor’s
theory of asymmetric-dependence;[6] but it seems clear to me on independent
grounds that no such strong reduction can be made to work.[7]

We’re therefore forced to conclude that if (1) is true, then
propositional-attitude properties don’t enter essentially into
correct causal explanations of non-intentional facts. With so much
riding on (1), what’s to be said in its defense?

Some theorists accept (1) because they accept the covering-law
model of explanation, which holds that explanations are deductive
or probabilistic inferences at least one premise of which is a
law—a non-probabilistic law in the deductive case, a probabilistic
law in the probabilistic case. Explanations that take the form of
deductive inferences are called deductive-nomological (DN)
explanations. An example of a DN explanation of a singular fact would
be:

Water boils at 212° F at
sea level.

This water was heated to 212°
F at sea level.

Ergo, this water boiled.

In the case in which what’s being explained is a theory, where
that’s taken to be a conjunction of laws, then the explanation
takes the form of a deduction of that theory from premises one of
which is a more basic theory and the other of which is a conjunction
of "bridge laws" linking the theoretical terms of the theory
being explained to those of the explaining theory. These bridge laws
effect a reduction of the theoretical properties of the derived theory
to their counterparts in the theory from which the derived theory is
derived. As Patricia Churchland puts it, "intertheoretic
reduction is an instance of DN explanation, where what is explained is
not a single event but a law or set of laws."[8] Those who hold this view
also hold that all true non-basic theories ultimately reduce to
fundamental physics.

But what does "reduction" come to in this context?
The dominant answer among covering-law theorists seems to be what
I’ve called strong reduction: the reduced properties must be
identical to the properties with which they’re correlated in
the bridge laws. The rationale for this construal is succinctly put by
Jaegwon Kim (where ‘F*’ is the counterpart in the
reducing theory of ‘F’ in the reduced theory):

[Identities of the form property F = property F*] are
essential to the ontological simplification that we seek in theory
reduction, for they enable us to dispense with facts involving
F and G as something in addition to facts involving
F* and G*. They also allow us to give simple answers to
potentially embarrassing questions of the form, "But why does
property F correlate this way [i.e., in the way of the
biconditional ‘(x)Fxº (x)F*x’] with property
F*" Our answer: "Because F just is
F*."[9]

The sort of rationale Kim offers for why the covering-law theorist
needs strong reduction can motivate strong reduction independently of
the covering-law model. It’s what lies behind my own claim in
Remnants of Meaning[10] that if there are mental properties,
then they must be identical to properties that are intrinsically
specifiable in non-intentional terms, and it’s what lies behind
Kim’s advocacy of what he has called

"the problem of causal/explanatory exclusion": For any
single event, there can be no more than a single sufficient cause, or
causal explanation, unless it is a case of causal
overdetermination.[11]

In other words, the problem for the strong reductionist who
supposes that something can have both a physical and a mental cause at
a given time is that the physical cause "threatens to exclude,
and preempt, the mental cause."[12] In Remnants, I argued that even
if one assumes that propositional-attitude state tokens are identical
to physical state tokens, one should also hold that
propositional-attitude properties are identical to physical
properties, given that propositional-attitude properties really do
play an indispensable causal-explanatory role in correct causal
explanations of non-intentional facts.[13] The problem that’s apt to make one
a strong reductionist is the problem of explaining the relation
between an apparently causally relevant propositional-attitude
property and the concurrent underlying causally essential
neurophysical property. When one surveys the explanatory options, one
may be tempted to think one has an argument by elimination for the
strong reduction of propositional-attitude properties to properties
intrinsically expressible in naturalistically kosher non-intentional
terms. I won’t go through the moves of such an argument by
elimination, except, with some chagrin, to tell you the reasons I gave
for rejecting the idea that we could explain the connection by saying
that, while intentional properties weren’t identical to properties
intrinsically specifiable in naturalistic terms, the former properties
nevertheless supervene on the latter. Here, before someone quotes it
back to me, is what I wrote in Remnants of Meaning:

G. E. Moore was a non-naturalist in ethics: he held that moral
properties could not be identified with natural properties; and he
held, on the positive side, that they were simple, irreducible,
unanalyzable, non-natural properties, and that, being non-natural,
they were discerned through a special faculty of moral
intuition. Tough-minded physicalist types (including many Logical
Positivists) agreed that moral properties could not be reduced to
natural properties..., but had no sympathy at all with Moore’s
positive thesis, which postulated a realm of non-natural properties
and facts. These properties, it was felt, could not be made sense of
within a scientific world view; they were obscurantist and produced
more problems than they solved. At the same time, philosophers who
abhorred Moore’s irreducibly non-natural properties knew that he
also held this thesis about them: that it was not possible for two
things or events to be alike in all physical respects while differing
in some moral property. No one thought that Moore’s positive theory
of moral properties was in any way mitigated by this further
supervenience thesis. How could being told that non-natural
moral properties stood in the supervenience relation to physical
properties make them any more palatable? On the contrary, invoking a
special primitive metaphysical relation of supervenience to explain
how non-natural moral properties were related to physical properties
was just to add mystery to mystery, to cover one obscurantist move
with another. I therefore find it more than a little ironic, and
puzzling, that supervenience is nowadays being heralded as a way of
making non-pleonastic, irreducibly non-natural mental properties
cohere with an acceptably naturalist solution to the mind-body
problem.... Supervenience is just epiphenomenalism without
causation.[14]

I now find this unsatisfactory. There’s a weak and a strong
response to the suggestion that we have in the supervenience relation
between intentional and non-intentional properties a necessitation
relation holding between disparate properties whose holding can be
discovered only a posteriori. The weak "objection" is
merely that the suggestion owes something more to be
acceptable—namely, some sort of explanation or demystification of
how there could be that kind of supervenience state of affairs. That
point seems right to me, notwithstanding the vagueness of
"explanation" or "demystification" in this
context. The strong objection is that no such explanation or
demystification can be given. The trouble with this strong objection
is that no reason has yet been given to think it’s true, other than
that no such explanation or demystification has so far been
given. Related to this is that the quoted passage puzzles over a
non-pleonastic property supervening on a distinct
non-pleonastic property, but what if all properties are
"pleonastic," entities whose existence is secured by
conceptual truths such as the proposition that if Fido is a dog, then
Fido has the property of being a dog, entities whose nature is
determined by the linguistic and conceptual practices by which
they’re introduced into our ontology? Perhaps then it won’t be
so difficult adequately to account for the way the intentional depends
on the non-intentional. There will be a bit more on this later.

A final motivation for strong reduction used to be urged on me by
Hartry. In Remnants §6.5, after rejecting strong reduction,
I appealed to the fact that the conceptual roles of our
propositional-attitude concepts meshed with our underlying
physical workings to secure the reliability of our
propositional-attitude predictions and explanations. To this Hartry
responded that strong reduction, or something pretty close to it, was
needed precisely to explain the mesh. I responded to this objection in
"Physicalism,"[15] but my argument there was too bound up
with a nominalism I no longer accept. In any case, I don’t accept
Hartry’s objection. It’s enough for now that we see that
reduction isn’t needed to explain the reliability of our
propositional-attitude-based predictions, the predictions we make
about what others will do based on the propositional-attitudes we
correctly ascribe to them. When we correctly predict what someone will
do we rely on our beliefs about how people come to have their
propositional-attitudes and about how a person’s propositional
attitudes affect what she will do. What Hartry’s challenge
primarily demands is an account of what determines the content of our
propositional-attitude states that’s consistent with what’s
required non-intentionally in order to account for how we form our
propositional-attitudes and for how our propositional attitudes lead
to action. There are several coherent stories to tell about the
determination of content all of which cohere with underlying
mechanisms that account for how certain sorts of predictions based on
correct ascriptions of propositional attitudes tend to be reliable. I
see no reason to suppose that anything even approximating reduction is
needed to achieve this coherence, and (not that it’s relevant, but)
Hartry’s present account of propositional attitudes forces him to
reject his former mesh objection.

The wide-content objection. This familiar objection goes
like this:

If propositional-attitude properties played a causal-explanatory
role in correct explanations of non-intentional facts, then they would
supervene on what’s in the head—i.e., on the non-intentional
features of one’s neural states which would be shared by any of
one’s Doppelgängers, regardless of the
Doppelgänger’s external environment. As Stephen Stich
put it:

… any state or property properly invoked in a psychological
explanation should supervene on the current, internal, physical state
of the organism. Thus, a pair of Putnamian doppelgangers, being
molecule for molecule replicas of one another, must share all the same
explanatory psychological states and properties.[16]

Jerry Fodor expressed the same view, only wrapped in a dire
warning:

Causal powers supervene on local microstructure. In the
psychological case, they supervene on local neural structure. We
abandon this principle at our peril; mind/brain supervenience ... is
our only plausible account of how mental states could have the causal
powers that they do have.[17]

Propositional-attitude properties typically don’t supervene on
what’s in the head.

Fred Dretske’s gloss of the problem is representative of those
who accept (1) and (2):

The prevailing wisdom among materialists is that even if we can
give an otherwise creditable account of Intentionality, the properties
that give a structure its intentional identity, the facts that
underlie its content ... will ... turn out to be explanatorily
irrelevant. Even if some events have a meaning, and even if ... they
have an impact on their material surroundings, the fact that they mean
what they do won’t help explain why they do what they do.

This doctrine about what Dennett calls the impotence of
meaning should not be taken to imply that the objects having meaning
are causally inert. It only means that it is not their intentional
properties, their content or meaning, from which they derive their
causal powers. Though a brick was made in Hoboken, it gets its power
to break windows from its velocity and mass, not from its having been
made in Hoboken. By the same token, although events in the brain,
those we might want to identify with a particular thought about
Hoboken, are about Hoboken, their power to stimulate glands and
regulate muscle tension—and thus to control behavior—derive, not
from what they mean, not from the fact that they are about Hoboken,
but from their electrical and chemical properties....

This ... problem about the causal role of meaning ... arises from
the fact that meaning ... supervenes on a set of facts that are
different from the facts that explain why a structure (with that
meaning) has the effects it has. Let M be the set of properties
and relations in virtue of which event E means what it
does. Let C be the set of properties and relations in virtue of
which E causes what it does. M is not identical to
C.... What gives sounds the meaning they have is not what
confers on them the power to shatter glass and rattle eardrums; what
makes ... a picture of ... my Uncle Harold is not what gives it
the power to reflect light in the way it does.... The same can be said
abut those physical events, processes and structures in the brain that
are supposed to be a person’s thoughts, hopes, and
desires. The fact that something in the head, a thought for instance,
has truth conditions doesn’t help explain the thought’s effect
on motor output. Thoughts, the things with content, make a
difference ... but the fact that they are thoughts ... is not relevant
to the difference they make.[18]

No one should question (2), the claim that content doesn’t
supervene on what’s in the head, and hardly anyone nowadays
would. For suppose that the things to which your Twin Earth
Doppelgänger applies the word ‘dog’ look and behave
exactly like dogs but are actually of a different zoological species
and thus aren’t dogs. Nevertheless, it’s not plausible that only
one of you expresses a true belief when she says ‘There’s a big
dog growling at me’. The belief your Doppelgänger
expresses has as much right to be true as the one you express, thus
showing that in this case propositional-attitude properties don’t
supervene on what’s in the head.

But why accept (1), why take this to show that
propositional-attitude properties don’t play a causal-explanatory
role?

One answer is more or less explicit in Dretske. He’s saying two
things: first, that propositional-attitude properties like believing
that a car is coming aren’t "causal powers" of the states
that have them, and, second, that it follows from their not being
causal powers that they’re also "explanatorily
irrelevant," which I take to mean that though we may cite such
properties in giving psychological explanations, the reason we cite
them isn’t that they really occur in the explanations we’re
giving. Now, ‘causal power’ is a term of art and we’re
entitled to ask what it means. It’s hard to say what it means;
it’s not defined, so we have to garner its meaning by figuring out
when those who use it are willing or unwilling to apply it. Still, it
does seem that the following is taken to be sufficient for a property
F’s not being a "causal
power" of c with respect to its causing e:

in addition to having F, c
also has a property Y that would count
as a "causal power" on any precisification of that vague
notion;

although c wouldn’t have caused e if c
hadn’t had F, that’s just because
c’s having F supervenes on
c’s having a certain property that includes Y in such way that c wouldn’t have
had Y or any other same-level causal
power if c hadn’t had F;

while there may well be a causal law involving Y, there’s none (or none that’s
relevant) containing F.

Very well, let’s agree to use ‘causal power’ in such a way
that satisfaction of the foregoing conditions is sufficient for not
being a causal power. Why should a propositional-attitude
property’s not being a causal power in that sense be taken to show
that it’s explanatorily irrelevant? An argument is needed to
get us from "Such-and-such isn’t a causal power" to
"Such-and-such is explanatorily irrelevant." What is it?
While Dretske’s trying to answer that question, we should also
demand that he answer the following question:

It’s clear that by virtue of its meaning "Oops,
I did it again," the sequence of sounds produced by the soprano
was neither a causal power with respect to its causing the glass to
break nor relevant to the explanation of why the glass broke. This is
clear because we would without any hesitation reject the explanation
that the glass broke because the emitted sounds meant "Oops, I
did it again." Even without any philosophical theorizing,
that’s just not an explanation anyone would countenance. The fact
that the sounds had that meaning is as explanatorily irrelevant as the
fact that the soprano who emitted them was wearing purple nail
polish. Yet the situation is radically different as regards the
explanation of Ava’s stepping back to the curb. Without any
philosophical theorizing, we would without any hesitation accept the
claim that she stepped because she believed that a car was coming,
even though, as it’s now revealed, the property of being a belief
that a car is coming isn’t a "causal power" of the neural
state that at the relevant time caused her stepping back. What
explains this difference between the property of meaning "Oops, I
did it again" and the property of believing that a car is
coming?

Maybe a good strategy would be to assume as a provisional
hypothesis that the reason we’re happy to say that Ava stepped
back because she believed that a car was coming but not that
the glass broke because the sounds emitted by the soprano meant
"Oops, I did it again," even though neither meaning
"Oops, I did it again" nor being a belief that a car is
coming is a causal power, is that the second property, but not the
first, is explanatorily relevant. If the account arrived at in this
way coheres well with our firm intuitions about when something is
essential to a correct causal explanation, then we ought to conclude
that the inference from "Not a causal power" to
"explanatorily irrelevant" is a non sequiter. In any
event, we’ve yet to see a good reason for thinking the inference is
a sequiter.

There are two further problems for the line of thought under
consideration. One is that we’ve so far been proceeding as though
Ava’s belief state token were identical to the neural state token
that was a cause of her bodily movement; but this assumption is
controversial. As I see it, it’s at best indeterminate whether
propositional-attitude state tokens are identical to physical or
topic-neutral state tokens. In order for an identity statement to be
determinately true, there must be a non-trivial account of what makes
it true, as for example the identity of heat with molecular motion is
accounted for by the fact that we fix the reference of ‘heat’ as
whatever causes in us the sensation of heat and then discover that its
molecular motion which plays that causal role. Such an account will
typically, if not always, determine an epistemic route implicit in the
concepts of the thing or things in question by virtue of which the
truth or falsity of the identity claim could be discovered by
relevantly placed agents. No such account or route is available for a
claim that such-and-such propositional attitude = such-and-such
neuro-physical state token. In no way, however, should this make one
conclude that propositional attitudes can’t be causes of
non-intentional states—unless one’s also prepared to conclude
that propositional attitudes can’t be causes or effects of
non-intentional states, as when light reflected from an oncoming rock
enters your eyes and causes you to have the belief that a rock is
coming towards your head, which belief in turn causes you to duck. Yet
the present line of thought supporting (1) would imply that Ava’s
belief that a car was coming played no role either in causing her
bodily movement or in the explanation of her stepping back to the
curb, unless that state token were identical to a neural state
token. That should strike one as highly counterintuitive.

The second further problem is that although those sympathetic to
the Dretskian line say that content would be explanatorily relevant if
only it supervened on what’s in the head—precisely what’s
suggested by the wording of (1) of the wide content
objection—that’s in fact not a view to which they’re
entitled. What’s really implied by the Dretskian argument for (1)
is that it’s entirely irrelevant whether or not content supervenes
on what’s in the head. For if the argument were sound, it would
show that, whatever the supervenience situation was, the only
explanatorily relevant property would be that neurophysical property
that was the causal power. This effectively cuts the legs out of those
who accept the present objection to "wide" content’s
playing a causal-explanatory role and go on to claim that what’s
needed is a notion of "narrow" content. What they ought to
conclude is that no kind of content can play a causal-explanatory
role.

A second reason some have found for accepting (1) is motivated by
the following sort of thought experiment, this one by Brian Loar:

… suppose that I do not know whether in Bert’s linguistic
community "arthritis" means arthritis or tharthritis, but
that I know all the relevant individualist facts about Bert [i.e.,
intentional facts that supervene on what’s in Bert’s head]. I
read in his diary: "I fear I have arthritis, and so today I have
made an appointment with a specialist." It is difficult to accept
that we do not fully understand the psychological explanation given
here, despite our not being in a position to produce the correct
that-clause.[19]

Loar’s point is that since you can know the explanation of
Bert’s going to a specialist without knowing the propositional
contents of the beliefs and desires involved in it, content is
irrelevant to propositional-attitude explanation and hence doesn’t
play a genuinely causal-explanatory role. But we should be suspicious
of Loar’s example when we realize that he might just well have said
the same thing about our reaction to Bert’s diary entry ‘I fear
I have aldosteronism, and so today I have made an appointment with a
specialist’, when we have no idea what medical condition
aldosteronism might be. A better response to such examples is that
commonsense explanations are answers to contextually implicit why
questions, and its easy to imagine contexts in which the diary entry
would tell us all we’d want to know about Bert’s behavior. You
might as well conclude that a computer’s hardware properties
don’t play a causal-explanatory role because you could be satisfied
by being told that your computer isn’t working properly because of
a defect in its motherboard, even though you have only the foggiest
idea of what a motherboard is.

A third reason for accepting (1) is offered by Daniel Dennett, but
one can find it repeated by Fodor and others:

If psychology is going to be science, it had better not posit
mysterious action-at-a-distance [my emphasis], so a principle
of the "supervenience" of the psychological on the
physiological must be honored: the brains of organism differ whenever
their minds differ.[20]

The main problem with this (there are others) is that action-at-a-distance requires distant but unconnected causes, and an absence of action-at-a-distance is entirely consistent with causes having properties that relate them to distant things.

The no-law objection. This can be put in the following way.

Propositional-attitude properties play a causal-explanatory role
only if they figure in true causal laws.

Many who want to resist the conclusion—e.g., Jerry Fodor when
he’s not accepting the conclusion—deny (2) by claiming that
while there are no true strict, or exceptionless,
propositional-attitude laws, there are true ceteris paribus
propositional-attitude causal laws. I doubt that there are such laws,
and I refer you to my article "Ceteris Paribus Laws,"
where I try to show why.[21] The same issue of Mind contains
Jerry Fodor’s "You Can Fool Some of the People All the Time,
Everything Else Being Equal: Hedged Laws and Psychological
Explanations,"[22] which replies to my paper. When the
issue containing our papers appeared, Fodor said to me that the
editors of Mind forgot to say who won. I’m going to assume
that I did, so that the question now is what can be said for premise
(1). Why, that is, think that causal explanations require causal
laws?

One who thinks causal explanations require laws is mostly likely an
adherent of the covering-law model of explanation and holds
tenaciously to the view that if there were no ceteris paribus
laws there would be no special-science laws, hence no special science
explanations, and hence no special sciences. But when we look at
typical explanations in special sciences such as biology or geology,
one’s apt to wonder whether the covering-law model is the best
model for the explanations taken to be correct in those sciences. I
challenge anyone to find geological laws in the preferred explanation
in plate tectonics of how the Himalayas were formed, or to find
biological laws in the explanation of how the HIV penetrates host
cells. What one finds are law-free stories about the mechanisms
by which certain things happen. To be sure, laws may well be needed to
account for how the mechanisms work, but these laws will be laws of
more basic sciences, not laws of the special sciences offering the
geological or biological explanations. And many correct commonsense
explanations seem far removed from a nomological component, as in the
following example which Terry Horgan attributes to Barry Loewer:

… there are examples of causal transactions in which the cause
and the effect have properties which evidently are not connected by
even a [ceteris paribus] generalization, but which seem
explanatorily relevant anyway. Suppose, for instance, that Barry’s
noticing a flower shop causes him to remember that tomorrow is his
wife’s birthday. The properties being a noticing that there is a
flower shop yonder and being a remembering that tomorrow is
one’s wife’s birthday, certainly appear explanatorily
relevant to the causal transaction; yet generalizations like

Ceteris paribus, a (married) man who notices that there is a
flower shop yonder will remember that the following day is his
wife’s birthday

The eliminativist objection. This objection enjoys a simple
statement: propositional-attitude properties can’t play a
causal-explanatory role because there are no propositional
attitudes. There are at least two reasons philosophers have claimed
for believing that there are no propositional attitudes (its their
oxymoron, not mine). The first is associated with Paul and Patricia
Churchland, though it has precursors in Paul Feyerabend and Richard
Rorty.[24]
As stated by the Churchlands, the idea is that the notion of a
propositional attitude is implicitly defined by its role in
commonsense psychology and, as so defined, it requires that our brains
enjoy a certain functional organization. Since, they further claim,
there’s very good reason to suppose that our brains don’t have
that functional organization, there’s very good reason to suppose
there are no propositional attitudes and that, therefore, the theory
that defines the notion of them is false. Propositional attitudes and
propositional-attitude theory must go the way of phlogiston and
phlogiston theory. The other reason for denying that propositional
attitudes exist is that the truth of propositional-attitude
reports—e.g., the claim that Ralph believes that the earth is
flat—require abstract entities called "propositions" to
be the references of that-clauses, and propositions don’t
exist. This is reminiscent of Hartry’s claim that arithmetical
statements such as ‘1 + 1 = 2’ can’t be true since there are
no numbers for numerical singular terms like ‘1’ and ‘2’
to refer to. Mark Crimmins, who will occupy the hot seat later this
semester, takes this line, and, just as Hartry tries to lighten the
counter-intuitiveness of his theory by claiming that arithmetic
statements are at least true in the "fiction of arithmetic,"
so Crimmins holds that propositional-attitude statements are true in
the fiction of, I guess, the story of propositional attitudes. And
just as Hartry needn’t reject physical explanation that try to
refer to numbers, so Crimmins needn’t deny that correct
explanations are given by propositional-attitude explanations. It’s
just that those propositional attitudes don’t enter essentially
into those correct explanations.

To the Churchlands I say that, while I can’t speak for them,
I know that nothing could convince me that I don’t have any
beliefs. If I were to learn that, like a chocolate Easter bunny, I was
hollow inside, that would just tell me that you don’t need a
stuffed head to have beliefs. To Crimmins and other fictionalists I
say that their position is not well motivated because they don’t
have the good reasons they think they have for doubting that
propositions exist. If their worry is how to account for knowledge or
reliable beliefs about propositions, then they should appreciate that
given the right conception of propositions, it’s a conceptual truth
which we know a priori that propositions exist.[25]

The psychology-doesn’t-need-them objection. In his
well-known and influential paper "Mental
Representation,"[26] Hartry wrote:

If the task of psychology is to state (i) the laws by which an
organism’s beliefs and desires evolve as he is subjected to sensory
stimulations, and (ii) the laws by which those beliefs and desires
affect his bodily movements, then semantic characterizations of
beliefs and desires are irrelevant to psychology: one can state the
laws without saying anything at all about what the believed or desired
sentences mean, or what their truth-conditions are or what their
subject matter is.[27]

This was then taken by Field and others to show that content
doesn’t play a causal-explanatory role, doesn’t, that is, occur
essentially in whatever correct explanations are implied by our
commonsense propositional-attitude ‘because’ statements. I have
a major and a minor problem with this objection.

The major problem is that I don’t see how the truth of the
quotation is supposed to show anything about whether content occurs
essentially in correct propositional-attitude causal explanations. The
proposition expressed by the quotation in no way entails that
content doesn’t play a causal-explanatory role. An additional
premise is needed. What is it? What’s the necessary condition for
content’s playing such a role which the truth of the quotation
shows can’t be satisfied? It can’t be a point about
"explanatory exclusion" per se. If, as many would
claim, the result of replacing ‘psychology’ with
‘neuroscience’ in the quotation would again yield a truth,
nobody would take that to show content doesn’t occur essentially in
correct causal explanations. So why should putting ‘psychology’
back make a difference? A first thought (not Field’s) might be that
the real point is that the propositional-attitude explanations we give
always implicitly offer a correct "syntactic"
explanation of the kind to which Field is alluding. This, however, has
no credibility. Forget that it ignores propositional-attitude
explanations of propositional-attitude facts; it also seems to forget
that our propositional-attitude explanations are almost never trying
to explain a mere bodily movement, and that when we have in mind the
sorts of non-intentional facts we actually use content to explain, it
will become painfully clear that anything that might be called a
"syntactic," or non-intentional computational, explanation
of the same fact would take about a bizillion years to state and
isn’t even remotely available to anyone but God, and She isn’t
about to clue us in. For example, you ask why Harold is in Akron, and
I explain that he’s being pursued by his ex-wife and thinks it
won’t occur to her to look in Akron. What would be the correct
"syntactic" explanation of the fact that Harold is in Akron
on the assumption that it exists? Well, it would require a very
complete computational theory of Harold, one that could be used to
explain each of his intentional bodily movements, a theory that is
very, very far from being known by anyone, layman or scientist. And
that would be just the beginning. We would also need both a virtually
complete state description of the physical world at some designated
"initial position" (e.g. the time when Harold first learned
that his ex-wife was after him) plus a complete physics. While it’s
not unreasonable to think that such an explanation must in some way
underlie the explanation I actually give in citing Harold’s beliefs
and desires, it’s insane to think I was "implicitly"
giving any such non-intentional explanation. Of course, Hartry
wouldn’t deny this. But if he thinks we’re doing something right
other what one would pretheoretically think we’re doing right, what
is it? Presumably, it would be something to the effect that when I
tell you that Harold’s in Akron because he wants not to be found by
his ex-wife and believes she won’t think of looking for him in
there, what I’m really offering is something like an
"explanation sketch" of an incomplete
computational-cum-physical explanation. Yet even this seems very
implausible. I would hazard that the most one could be doing is
implicitly saying that there is a correct such explanation. But,
first, ordinary people aren’t in a position to do that, implicitly
or explicitly, and, second, even if one were in a position to make
that extremely boring and trivial existential generalization, why on
earth would we bother to say anything? Surely, anyone to whom I was
trying to tell that there was a correct computational-cum-physical
explanation of Harold’s being in Akron would already believe that
there was and would have no interest in being told it if she didn’t
already believe it. Besides, none of this even begins to explain why
we use intentional idioms to give these non-intentional explanation
sketches. Hartry, as you might have suspected, has something to say in
response to these questions, but since his readings for his session on
February 20th will include that response, I won’t pursue
this stuff any further now. I should, however, remind you that my
point isn’t that Hartry doesn’t have a good reason to deny that
content plays a serious causal-explanatory role; my point has been
that I don’t see how the quoted passage itself gives us any reason
to deny it.

My minor problem with the psychology-doesn’t-need-them objection, stated here without elaboration or defense, is that I think it’s quite problematic that there are correct "syntactic" explanations of the kind Hartry had in mind.

II. Withdrawal Positions

Suppose a theorist takes one or more of the foregoing objections to
be valid. To where in conceptual space should she withdrawal now that
she denies that propositional-attitude properties don’t occur
essentially in any correct causal explanation given by a commonsense
propositional-attitude explanation?

Extreme withdrawal. This is the position of the
Churchlands and perhaps of no one else. It holds that we should react
in the same way scientists who tried to explain combustion in terms of
phlogiston reacted when they discovered there was no such thing as
phlogiston: they simply realized that they were wrong in the
explanations they gave and stopped giving them, except perhaps in some
unserious instrumental vein, since, they probably allow, our
commonsense notions at least have some predictive value. No
comment.

Withdrawal to science. Embarrassed by the stridency and
counter-intuitiveness of their earliest pronouncements about content,
which seemed to imply that our commonsense
propositional-attitude explanations were on a par with appeals to
phlogiston in explanations of combustion, theorists like Stich and
Fodor retreated to claims about what’s needed for
scientific, as opposed to commonsense, psychological
explanations of behavior. OK, but where does that leave the idea that
content plays an essential role in correct commonsense causal
explanations? If that’s still denied, what’s the relevance of
the claim about scientific explanation? If it’s no longer being
denied, then this big change of mind means we’ve no business
discussing this view here.

Withdrawal to fictionalism. This response begins with
the claim that while commonsense propositional-attitude explanations
are never true (since there are no propositions), they are "true
in the fiction of propositional-attitude theory" (I haven’t
yet seen Crimmins’s contribution to this seminar, but for all I
know his response might begin with this fictionalist response). Yeah,
and where, pray tell, might I buy that novel, which I haven’t yet
had the pleasure of reading? Also, this theorist must of course
explain why we should care about truth in this particular fiction. One
partial answer that might be given is one presently to be considered
on its own—namely, in giving the false fictional explanations
we’re implicitly giving correct non-intentional explanations or
explanation sketches. Alternatively, or in conjunction with the
true-in-the-false partial answer, she might say the reason we give
explanations that are true only in the intentionality fiction is that
the fictional explanations have a certain instrumental value; they
allow us to influence and to predict one another’s behavior in ways
that are very useful to us. But then we must be told how the fiction
can do this, and one worries that any serious attempt to do this will
invite the question "Do you really think that your reasons
for accepting that (propositions don’t exist and
propositional-attitude reports can’t be true unless they do exist)
outweigh all the reasons you have for thinking that there are true
propositional-attitude causal explanations?"

Withdrawal to "narrow content." There was a
time, about fifteen to ten years ago, when most of those who advanced
the "wide content" objection went on to claim that what
psychology needed was a notion of narrow content, a notion of
content which, unlike the wide content ascribed by that-clauses, did
supervene on what’s in the head. This view seems no longer to be in
favor, and for good reason, I would say. Some of the things being
called narrow content, such as computational roles, had no business
being called content, so that the claim of these theorists was
just the claim, in disguise, that the only correct psychological
explanations of behavior were non-intentional, much like Hartry’s
suggestion in "Mental Representation." Fodor suggested an
intentional notion but it was hard to make both precise and plausible,
and it wasn’t clear that it really could be narrow. Other
characterizations of narrow content were quickly seen to be
flawed. The main objection I would make, however, is that the usual
arguments advanced to show that wide content didn’t play a
causal-explanatory role would, if sound, also show that no notion of
narrow content could play a causal-explanatory role. For what those
arguments really imply is that the only properties of a cause which
genuinely play a causal-explanatory role are those of its properties
that are the causal powers by virtue of which the cause caused its
effect.[28]
Any other property of the cause would be epiphenomenal if it wasn’t
a causal power, regardless of whether it happened to supervene on a
causal power.

Withdrawal to another kind of explanatory role. Some
have claimed that although content doesn’t play a
causal-explanatory role in correct causal explanations, it does
play an explanatory role. For a long time, mostly in the seventies,
the dominant view was that mental properties were functional
properties and that, therefore, psychological explanations were
functional explanations. Suppose you ask why a certain boiler exploded
and someone explains that it was caused by an event in the boiler that
had some unknown physical property F
that was related to such-and-such inputs to the boiler and
such-and-such other boiler states and conditions in such a way that an
event’s having F would be a
necessary part of a causally sufficient condition for causing an
explosion. You would have been given a kind of causal explanation, but
the second-order functional property used in the explanation—the
property of having some physical property F such that ...—seems intuitively not to
be playing anything worth calling a causal-explanatory
role. According to the functionalist, the same goes for the functional
properties expressed or referred to by our propositional-attitude
predicates in propositional-attitude explanations. The problem with
functionalism about propositional attitudes, it’s now generally
appreciated, is that there are evidently decisive reasons for denying
that propositional-attitude properties reduce to functional
properties.[29]

Several of these philosophers—e.g., Fred Dretske, Colin McGinn,
and Ruth Millikan—hold that content plays some sort of
teleological role, although they don’t all opt for quite the
same teleological role. Fred Dretske, for example, has claimed that
propositional-attitude properties explain not why propositional
attitudes cause the actions they cause, but rather why we have those
internal causes in the first place. This seems wrong; among several
other things, it’s hard to see how anything like this can be going
on when we explain that Johnny wrote ‘4’on his exam paper
because he believed that 12 + 12 = 4, or that
Ralph was looking for a virgin so that he could catch a unicorn.

More recently, Frank Jackson and Philip Petit have argued that
propositional-attitude explanations are what they call "program
explanations."[30] For an exposition of their proposal,
as well as plausible objections to it, see Kim’s Mind in a
Physical World, pp. 72-77.

Withdrawal to an undercover
explanation. "Why," you ask, "did Lester get so
violently ill?" "Because," someone explains, "he
ate the stuff in Mary’s lunch box." In context, this may be an
adequate explanation, but should we want to say that the property of
having eaten the stuff in Mary’s lunch box is playing in this
explanation a causal-explanatory role? In this context, we don’t
want to say that the property of being the stuff in Mary’s lunch
box was gratuitous, had no pointed related to explanatory concerns,
but we intuitively want to say that the real causal property alluded
to was the property of having eaten rat poison (well, we might want to
say that until we realize that we can make the same point about the
property of being rat poison viz-à-viz the property of
having such-and-such chemical composition). In any event, it might be,
and has been, suggested that propositional-attitude properties are
playing the same sort of role, alluding, so to say, to properties that
might more legitimately be said to be playing a causal-explanatory
role. In this way, so-called propositional-attitude explanations would
turn out covertly to be non-intentional explanations of this kind. The
main problem confronting this line is to make sure that what one
claims is the undercover explanation doesn’t force one also to
conclude, by parity of reasoning, that the only explanations are those
forthcoming from a correct version of fundamental physics. Since
Hartry will be advancing an undercover line when it’s his turn at
bat, I’ll defer further discussion until then.

So far I’ve been using expressions like ‘cause’,
‘causal explanation’, and ‘causal-explanatory role’ as
though in each case it determinately applied or determinately failed
to apply, it being our job to discover which determinate fact
obtained. Ha, ha. The truth of course is that these expressions are
even vaguer than most vague expressions (virtually all expressions are
vague to some degree). We want to do our best to make sure that a
dispute on these matters isn’t about where to draw an arbitrary
line in some expression’s penumbra. I’ll try not to say anything
that will degenerate into a squabble with no determinate resolution
about which views get to own the honorific labels.

An explanation is what is typically conveyed by a ‘because’
statement, as when we explain that Ava stepped back to the curb
because she believed that stepping back was the best way to avoid
getting run over and preferred not to get run over. This is a
paradigmatic propositional-attitude explanation, and in this typical
use of propositional-attitude properties lies their explanatory role.
The explanatory role of propositional-attitude properties just is
their ability to occur in true and contextually apt
propositional-attitude ‘because’ statements, and I operate on
the defeasible assumption that some of those statements are both true
and contextually apt. I’ll try to say as much as can be said
up to indeterminacy about what are and what are not the truth and
aptness conditions for propositional-attitude ‘because’
statements, and thereby about the explanatory role of propositional
attitude properties. If enough can be said, it should throw
considerable light on the point of our having propositional-attitude
concepts. I won’t now attempt to motivate my ex cathedra
pronouncements any more than they’ve already been motivated. I
begin with some negative claims about utterances of the form

[*] xFed because x PAed that ...

N1. The truth of a [*] utterance requires neither strict nor
ceteris paribus propositional-attitude causal laws of any
relevance to our discussion. This isn’t to deny that a ceteris
paribus generalization might express a truth; it’s only to deny
that such a truth would be anything that could reasonably be called a
causal law (or indeed any other kind of law). It’s also the case
that paradigmatic special-science causal explanations don’t require
strict or ceteris paribus laws. And while we can speak of
completions of the partial explanations we give in uttering
propositional-attitude ‘because’ statements, no such completion
contains anything that can even be called a serious theory, forget
about laws.

N2. Propositional-attitude properties typically doesn’t
supervene on what’s in the head, and thus can’t be identified
with any relevant "causal powers" that are in the head. In
this connection we should note that it’s plausible that many
special-science explanatory notions are analogously "wide."
For example, the property of being a gene doesn’t supervene on the
mircrostructural properties of DNA sequences, for, as Ron McClamrock
points out, in order to be a gene something must contribute to the
phenotype in ways that will typically depend on relations to other
genetic materials and to the nature of the coding mechanisms that act
on the DNA sequences. "So the properties of a particular gene
considered as that kind of DNA sequence are supervenient on its local
microstructure, but its properties considered as that kind of
gene are not."[32]

N3. As I’ve already suggested, it’s at best indeterminate
whether propositional-attitude state tokens are identical to physical
state tokens, and the reason this is so also shows that it’s at
best indeterminate whether propositional attitudes are identical to
topic-neutral state tokens.

N4. Our use of ‘cause’ is pretty relaxed. Pace
Davidson, causes are not just event or state tokens. They can also be
conditions ("What caused the accident was the icy condition of
the road") or facts ("The fact that the vase was cracked
caused it to break when he touched it"). Evidently, something may
in a suitable context correctly be called a cause merely if the effect
would not have occurred had it not obtained and it can be cited in a
correct explanation of the fact that the effect occurred.

On the positive side I would claim:

P1. [*] is true only if, absent the sort of
overdetermination that rarely occurs, x would not have
Fed if x hadn’t PAed that ....

P2. The fact that, e.g., Ava wouldn’t have stepped back had she
not believed that a car was coming is due to the fact that her
believing that a car was coming was in some sense non-causally
necessitated by—in some sense "supervened" on—a
non-intentional fact that included causally crucial individualistic
facts. What makes it true that Ava wouldn’t have stepped back had
she not believed that a car was coming is that neither the causally
crucial individualistic fact (the fact that a certain neural state had
such-and-such neural property) nor any other such fact would have
obtained if Ava hadn’t believed that a car was coming. What’s
not so clear is, first, what sort of supervenience is needed here
(especially in view of the fact that some beliefs involve being in
certain experiential states), and, second, what explains such
supervenience between such disparate properties.[33]

P3. Let’s call the necessary condition stated in P1 the
counterfactual core of a propositional-attitude explanation
(and let’s ignore that fact that not every propositional-attitude
explanation is of form [*]). The counterfactual core isn’t a
sufficient condition for the truth of a [*] utterance. Suppose, to
recall one of the examples with which I began, Henry’s face
suddenly became read because he realized that Jerry Fodor overheard
him say that Britney Spears was a better singer than any soprano the
MET could produce. We wouldn’t suppose this to be explained by the
statement that

Henry’s face suddenly became red because he believed that he
wasn’t the only person alive

even though that satisfies the counterfactual core. What more do we
need? To a rough first approximation, we can say:

Commonsense explanations are given by ‘because’ statements,
and they’re answers to explicit or implicit ‘why’
questions. When we ask why aFed, whether or not a is animate, we typically have in mind a
kind of property that the cause of a’s Fing
had and without which it wouldn’t have caused a’s Fing. When I ask how come you’re in Akron,
I would take an answer that appealed just to details about your
nervous system and the world outside your body not to be giving me the
information I requested. I want information I can use; I want
my answer propositional-attitude style.

Let’s say that a particular utterance of form [*] is true
if (though not only if) it both satisfies the
counterfactual core and the propositional-attitude property it
expresses is apt to the contextually-determined ‘why’
question. Apt properties are those that satisfy ‘why’ questions,
and not every property that satisfies the counterfactual core is apt;
only some of those properties can satisfy the motives behind a
‘why’ question. The question thus becomes: What determines which
properties that satisfy the counterfactual core will matter to us in
the explanation context?

I hazard that properties of kind K are capable of being apt
with respect to propositions of kind K¢ when (though not only when): (i)
Propositions that ascribe properties of kind K (kind K
propositions) frequently satisfy the counterfactual core with respect
to propositions of kind K¢.
(ii) There is a reliable practice of predicting kind K¢ propositions on the basis of kind K
propositions. (iii) In addition to having epistemic access to kind
K propositions, we have ways of bringing about or preventing
the truth of kind K propositions, which ways are extremely
advantageous to us (think of what it would be like if we couldn’t
influence the behavior of others!). It’s obvious that
propositional-attitude properties satisfy these conditions. A good
elaboration of the instrumental value to us of propositional-attitude
concepts would also succeed in making clear the raison
d’être of language: to exploit the fact that many kinds
of belief are highly reliable, thereby enabling us to exploit
one another as sources of information about the non-mental world by
inferring from the fact that one has a certain belief to the
conclusion that the proposition believed is true.

In light of the foregoing, let’s now return to the vague
questions put on hold: Are propositional attitudes causes of bodily
movements? If so, then do propositional-attitude properties enter
essentially into the correct causal explanations afforded by
propositional-attitude ‘because’ statements?

There can be no serious doubt that as we use ‘cause’ in
ordinary language, the propositional-attitude facts expressed in
correct propositional-attitude explanations can be said to be causes
and to determine propositional attitudes that can be said to be
causes. To be sure, this is consistent with wanting a more refined
notion of cause for this, that or the other purpose.

OK, so far as ordinary language goes, propositional-attitude
explanations are causal explanations, no matter what they do or
don’t manage to supervene on. (This isn’t to deny that we
wouldn’t know what to say if we couldn’t explain the truth of
the propositional-attitude counterfactuals.) Can we also say that
propositional-attitude properties are essential to the causal
explanations they’re used to give? That wouldn’t follow from
what we have so far. We can see this with a non-propositional-attitude
explanation. Suppose Sally is walking down the street and suddenly
lands on her keester. One person explains Sally’s fall by saying
that she stepped on a banana peel, and someone else explains it by
saying that she stepped on a slippery surface. It’s by no means
clear that the first explanation is a more complete explanation of the
fall than the second, notwithstanding that it satisfies the
counterfactual core and the aptness conditions specified above. Nor
does it seem right to say that the two statements give different but
equally correct explanations. But if both statements give the same
explanation, then, by virtue of the asymmetry between the property of
being a banana peel and the property of being slippery, we should
conclude that, though there are good pragmatic reasons for citing the
former property, it’s not an essential part of the
explanation the ‘because’ statement offers. Things get
interesting, however, when we next ask whether the property of being
slippery is essential to its explanation. For suppose we now have a
third explanation, offered by one physicist to another, which says
that Sally fell because she stepped on a surface having blah-blah
microphysical structure. There is an asymmetry between the property of
being slippery and the property of having blah-blah microphysical
surface structure, but if we say that slipperiness isn’t essential
to the explanation it’s used to give, then we’ll for sure end up
saying that the only explanatorily essential properties are those
expressible in quantum physics. And that simply isn’t how common
sense individuates commonsense explanations.[34]

Is there a difference between the banana peel/slipperiness
asymmetry and the slipperiness/blah-blah microphysical surface
structure asymmetry that would account for our intuition that while
being a banana peel isn’t essential to the explanation its used to
give, there’s a sense in which slipperiness is? I think so. The
first asymmetry is that stepping on a banana peel is liable to cause a
fall only because banana peels tend to be slippery, but stepping on
something slippery isn’t liable to cause a fall because some
slippery things are banana peels. The second asymmetry is quite
different: stepping on something slippery is liable to cause a fall
regardless of the surface’s microphysical structure. The asymmetry
here is a matter of supervenience: being slippery supervenes on
having blah-blah microphysical structure (or on a property that
includes that microphysical property), but not vice versa. Being a
banana peel does not supervene on being slippery (nor, of course, vice
versa).

When we turn back to a typical propositional-attitude property
mentioned in a true ‘because’ statement (e.g., Ava’s belief
that a car is coming), we see that there’s no other property in the
offing that stands to it in the way being slippery stands to being a
banana peel, although, of course, lots of properties stand to it the
way having a certain microphysical surface structure stands to being
slippery. In this respect there’s nothing any more special or
explanatorily relevant about an underlying computational-cum-physical
explanation of behavior, even if it can be called
‘psychological’, than there is about an underlying purely
physical explanation of the same behavior.

I draw two conclusions. First, that what matters most is that we
can see what it is about our propositional-attitude concepts that
accounts both for our having them and for our using them in
‘because’ statements. Second, that as far as common sense and
ordinary language and our vague notions of causation and causal
explanation go, propositional attitudes are causes of the actions for
which they’re also the reasons why the actor performed those
actions, and propositional-attitude properties are essential to those
explanations. If you disagree with me, please be sure your
disagreement isn’t verbal.

[1] Versions of some of these
objections may also be used to show that propositional-attitude
explanations don't even enter essentially into correct causal
explanations of propositional-attitude facts; but simplicity of
exposition recommends ignoring this for now.

[3] For specific references, see
Donald Davidson, "Actions, Reasons, and Causes," reprinted
in his Essays on Actions & Events (OUP, 1980). Davidson's famous
paper, which was first published in 1963, was widely thought to have
refuted the neo-Wittgensteinian line and to have shown that reasons
can be causes, though it raised problems of its own about the
causal-explanatory role of propositional-attitude properties.

[5] Being a relation to a
proposition doesn't per se make a relation intentional, any more than
being a relation to person makes a relation intentional just by virtue
of the fact that thinking about that person involves an intentional
relation. There is no more pressure on a physicalist to reduce
propositions to physical entities than there is to reduce numbers to
physical entities.

[7] See ch. 4,
"Intentionality and the Language of Thought," Remnants of
Meaning, and the essays by Lynne Rudder Baker, Paul Boghossian,
and Brian Loar in B. Loewer and G. Rey, eds., Meaning in Mind:
Essays on the Work of Jerry Fodor, (Blackwell, 1991).

[13] But I didn't end up
concluding that propositional-attitude properties strongly reduced to
properties that were intrinsically specifiable in non-intentional
terms. Instead, I ended up concluding that properties-not just
propositional-attitude properties but also physical and all other
properties-didn't really exist. They existed only as a manner of
speaking, a façon de parler, as "pleonastic" properties.
My present construal of 'pleonastic' isn't nominalistic, although it
does offer a deflationary account of the existence of abstract
entities such as properties and propositions. See my
"Meanings," in J. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & D. Shier (eds.),
Essays on Meaning & Truth (Seven Bridges Press, 2001).

[28] This probably isn't true
of Loar's argument for narrow content, which is primarily based on the
kinds of examples considered earlier in the text and not so much
concerned with wide content's failure to supervene on what's in the
head.

[29] For some of these
reasons, see Ned Block, "Troubles with Functionalism,"
Philosophical Review ..., and ch. 2 of my Remnants of
Meaning.

[33] Paul Boghossian puts the
point well: "in the absence of further comment, a relation of
supervenience between sets of distinct and highly disparate properties
is puzzling. How could there be a set of necessary connections between
such properties as being a certain configuration of molecules and
believing that Lully was a better composer than Purcell, given
the admittedly highly divergent characters of the properties involved?
We are entitled to be mystified" ("Naturalizing
Content," in B. Loewer and G. Rey, eds., op. cit.; p. 66). My
book-in-progress, The Things We Mean (to be published by Oxford
University Press), offers a demystification.

[34] But mightn't the
physicist say that he's not giving a different explanation of the fall
than the one that cites slipperiness? Yes, she might say that, but
then she's best interpreted as saying she's not offering a different
competing explanation.